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Britain’s role in the Rohingya tragedy

Ben Macintyre

The plight of Burma’s Muslims is inextricably linked to their wartime courage and loyalty to the Empire

In 1942, in the hill jungles of the Burmese-Indian border, a redoubtable, 30-year-old Roedean-educated former debutante suspended her anthropological study of the local head-hunting tribes and instead, armed with two Sten guns, led them into battle against the Japanese.

Ursula Graham Bower, the only female guerrilla leader in the history of the British Army, was part of “V Force”, a unit set up to recruit and arm local fighters along the 800-mile frontier between India and Burma. Bower led the Naga hill tribes, but many of the recruits to V Force were from the Muslim minority known as the Rohingya, the brutally persecuted ethnic group now at the centre of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Bower and V Force were defending the Empire.…

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